Apple Watch – Nobody Needs It

The dream of a five year old.

On Monday March 9, 2015, Apple finalized and solidified the release plans for the Apple Watch, telling customers to get ready to line up for the wearable device on April 24. But for what is this new gadget good for? Nothing! The Apple Watch is expensive, it is bad tasteandinfantile.

Everything was great, but now it gets even better. After about an hour the Apple event runs at towards its peak: Tim Cook, CEO of Apple since Steve Jobs is no longer with us, has told us a lot about the Apple Watch, this latest product from Apple, which will change everything again. Cook tries visibly to sound thrilled to awaken enthusiasm, he looks enthusiastic, you get the feeling now something really great is coming.

“You can even with the built-in receiver and microphone …”, says Cook, “you can receive calls with your watch! This is something I wanted to do since I was five years old! We finally made it this far!” Is this guy serious? But the stupids in the audience are eating up every word.

Well, finally, we came that far. A five year old wants to become fire and garbage man, astronaut or perhaps Dino researchers, but after a few years this will fade. And that’s a good thing.

In the eighties, an early evening program, the US series “Knight Rider” was on TV with David Hasselhoff. Whenever he got into trouble, he could lift his watch to his mouth and summoned his talking miracle car “KITT” .

The consumers of this in retrospect amazingly stupid TV series are now around 40 years old, exactly Apple’s target group for the watch: Technology Affine, professionals who want to act as much as possible youthful and they are ready to invest in expensive gadgets of questionable usefulness.

Will they spend money to be cool like David Hasselhoff? Are they excited to lift their wrist to finally talk to their watch: “KITT, get me out of here”?

That’s not cool, that’s an invasion

Apple’s gadgets targeted in the past the child in the man, and the author of this text scraped in the past together enough money to get the latest Apple stuff: From the Apple IIc, the Newton, who looked like a tricorder from “Star Trek” and could (more bad than good) recognize handwriting, to the iPod, perhaps the first product ever that held everything it promised. I never bought an iPhone. I always thought that the price for the gadget itself and the price for the service was nothing other than rape and robbery.

The Apple Watch has been for decades the first product innovation from Cupertino, which does not cause any cravings to own it. For over a decade, the mobile industry has given us the habit not to wear watches, now suddenly we should buckle on this chunky piece – and still carry an iPhone with us?

Every call, every breaking news, every annoying prompt should now be physically permanently attached to our bodies? That’s not cool, that’s an invasion.

While the iPhone was a revolutionary reinvention of the phone that it has enriched so many features that its main function, making phone calls, faded into the background, the Apple Watch acts as a dilution of what we know so far as the concept of a watch.

An Apple Watch is not timeless

A high quality watch is timeless, it lasts practically forever, making it a classic heirloom. The Apple Watch, however, is probably in a few years out of date, because it is then replaced by the next version. While the conventional wristwatch will not change its original appearance in a hundred years, Apple’s Watch is customizable according to your taste and mood you can have time shown with flowers, numbers or Mickey Mouse. Everybody cross-bred with a chimp will love it.

A watch is the style statement of an adult human. The adaptability of the product, commonly a feature of modern technology, is explicitly not allowed. With the Apple Watch, however, the design turns into a childish arbitrariness.

Maybe that’s why Cook refers to the dream of a Five Year Old.

P.S.: Despite my distain for the Apple Watch, I am sure it will be a bestseller. There are just so many morons in this country.